


each bolt a burning river

by mysticalmuddle



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Biting, Blood Kink, Brother/Sister Incest, Codependency, F/M, Outdoor Sex, Rough Sex, They Did The Monster Mash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:29:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27314092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mysticalmuddle/pseuds/mysticalmuddle
Summary: Stranger’s Night was the second full moon of fall, and moonlight the same wet glistening color of raw fat was falling through breaks in the canopy where the oak and elm trees had dropped their leaves. People came to Castle Cerwyn to party, but sometimes they left the castle to hang out in the cold, smoking or fucking or trying to set things on fire. Arya knew it didn’t have the same appeal if they could do those things inside, safe in the knowledge that Cley was too fucked up himself to try and stop them. She knew that was why her dad never said anything, even though he knew about the parties since Cley had started them in high school.The air didn’t feel like there were people out there with her. It felt crystalline smooth, empty of everything except the scent of the trees in her mouth, her nose.But the noise behind her still started again, less loudly. The wind creaked through the trees. Whoever walked behind her kept coming, a slow steady pace.
Relationships: Jon Snow/Arya Stark
Comments: 23
Kudos: 87





	each bolt a burning river

**Author's Note:**

> Page divider by OpenClipart-Vectors, pixabay.com. Title and epigraph taken as excerpt from Lighting, Mary Oliver.

### each bolt a burning river

She had to wait for ages to actually get Sansa’s attention, but finally one of the boys clustered around her and Jeyne moved away—someone dressed as the Stranger and reeking of sweat under his big black robes, gross—and Arya squirmed in close enough to catch Sansa’s eye.

She hadn’t seen her sister since they’d arrived, but Arya wasn’t surprised to find her perched on the high table in Castle Cerwyn’s hall, swinging her legs and giggling as she held court with her best girl friends and a dozen other boys, all of them vying for her attention. Arya hadn’t even gotten abandoned for anything important.

It wasn’t like she needed Sansa to hold her hand, but Arya didn’t know anyone there. It was all Cley Cerwyn’s friends, and people out of White Harbor University coming to party it up in an old drafty castle on Stranger’s Night.

Arya knew how parties like that worked, and she’d tried her hardest to blend in with everyone. She wasn’t totally helpless at it.

She’d had a drink, one that did nothing but make her hands sticky on the red plastic cup, something inside fumy enough to scorch the inside of her nose just bending her face towards the surface of it. She’d danced, but she kept having to move away from other people’s hands and pull down the skirt of her costume. Some dick in a cheap mask had tried to touch her ass, and she’d muttered out to herself all the bones in the arm as she removed his hand without giving him anything more than a bruise.

Everything reeked of sweat and cheap beer and pot smoke and the hair on the back of her neck wouldn’t settle. She’d go hang out with Gendry but he was face deep in some girl’s tits, and Hot Pie had disappeared ten minutes in, presumably to find someone willing to smoke him up and then to find the kitchen.

Sansa had said going out with her was better than staying home and sulking, and only a loser would pick handing out candy alone over crashing a college party. Arya could even bring her little friends, Sansa would so generously get them through the door if it meant Arya had a good time for once in her life. And she _knew_ this was Sansa trying to be nice to her. But Sansa had lied and Arya had stupidly eaten it right up—nothing about this was _fun_.

So now Arya was skulking in a crowd of overly horny boys, trying to catch her eye. “Can I talk to you for a minute?” she asked loudly, and even though she knew Sansa heard her over the music and all the dumbass laughter, she only glared and mouthed with an outrageously red mouth, _Go away_.

Arya crossed her arms and put her chin up. She wasn’t going to leave; she’d stand there for as long as she had to, jammed in between someone in bad Frankenstein’s monster makeup and someone ostensibly using toilet paper to make himself into a mummy. Sansa rolled her eyes and shoved away the boy closest to her, a hand on his chest. “You want to dance?” he asked her breathlessly as she uncrossed her legs and slid off the table.

“I have to powder my face,” she told him sweetly. “Why don’t you keep my friend company instead?”

Her lipstick left a mark as red as blood on his cheek. Jeyne didn’t have whatever Sansa did, Arya thought, whatever that little internal quirk was that made Sansa want attention, whatever helped her get it. But her sister was good at this; the boy turned to Jeyne right away, eagerly, pressing in close to put a hand on her bare knee.

“Come on,” Sansa said before Arya could see where it was going. She hooked her arm through Arya’s and dragged her off. 

“Did you need something?” she asked Arya. They skirted past the huge crowd dancing in the rest of the hall, edging close to the piled up tables to keep from getting sucked in, music blaring so loudly that Arya could feel the vibrations through the floor. She jerked her hands up to cover her ears, caught Sansa’s unimpressed look, let them fall back to her sides.

They went down the hallway just outside and Sansa demanded as she steered them towards the bathroom, her lips twisting, “Is someone bothering you?”

“No,” Arya said, but she knew Sansa had sharp senses. She muttered, “I can deal with it.”

It wasn’t like she’d damaged the guy. No one had even heard him cry out over the music, and he’d certainly think twice about bothering girls after that. Lying would have been the easiest, but if it got back to Sansa, and then to Mom or Dad, it would be easier to defend herself if Arya laid the groundwork now.

Sansa raised her eyebrows, hand on the doorknob. “Whatever,” she said at last. “I doubt he’d recognize you even if he came looking.”

The bathroom was a big echoey room tiled all over in white. Sansa shoved the door open without even knocking, and the two boys by the mirror, sticking their tongues down each other’s throats, tore themselves apart. “Sorry!” Sansa chirped, sweet as anything. “But we have to, you know—”

She said it nicely enough, but the tone of her voice, the posture of her spine, made Arya tense up in anticipatory sympathy. 

Sometimes it was hard not to be jealous at how easy it was for Sansa, for Robb. If Arya had tried that they would have shouted at her to find somewhere else, but the boys only took a look at Sansa, then apologized and left in a hurry. 

People wanted to be around her and Robb, near them. People did what they said. And it wasn’t even like they were pretending with it like Arya was pretending with her own friends. _Normal_ fit Robb and Sansa like a glove, and it fit Arya like a too-tight shoe. She had friends, loads of them, but she spent the whole time feeling like she was looking at them through a sheet of glass. Sansa and Robb, their friends didn’t know them, not really, but Sansa and Robb didn’t _care_.

The lying didn’t really bother them. Sansa said her friends didn’t have a right to her private life, and Robb was a guy—he didn’t talk to his friends about anything outside classes and video games and paintball marathons anyway.

Sometimes it felt like the lying was going to eat Arya up inside and she’d be left with an empty shell, ready for her family to pump in something new, a more acceptable version of herself.

Sansa snapped the door shut and went to the mirror first thing, checking anxiously on her lipstick. “Well?” she asked after a minute, fumbling in her bag to slick on more red with a twist of her wrist, the same color as her skirt and cloak.

Arya chewed her lip. She could still change her mind. She could ask for help with her own lipstick, all chewed off, and Sansa would like her better for it. When they went home, in the morning when she heard, Mom would look at Arya like she’d done something right. 

Her chest ached. Her heartbeat hadn’t gone down for a single second in the entire hour they’d been there. She kept making a noise low in her chest, choking it back down before it came out of her throat. “When are we going home?” she asked instead. 

The lipstick banged when Sansa chucked it onto the counter. “We’ve barely been here for an hour,” she said and glared at her in the mirror. “You— Seriously, Arya?” 

Her eyes in the mirror were bright and angry, but they were still Tully blue. Arya bristled, tried to calm herself. She clenched her hands in the hem of her skirt. Her heartbeat wouldn’t go down, and it set her teeth on edge. “ _You_ were the one who wanted me to come with you,” she snapped. “Look, I did it, okay? I did the whole partying thing. And I just don’t— I want to go home.”

It was hard not to resent Sansa. It slipped out of Arya’s mouth, savage as a bite. “So when are you going to be done doing _whatever_ with all those boys?”

“Is that what this is about?” and she sounded sympathetic but mostly smug. Sansa turned around and sighed at her. “You don’t have to be so dramatic. I’ll find someone to dance with you. You could’ve just asked. I don’t mind helping; I brought you out here to help you.”

Sansa offered her a smile, warm and bright. “Was there someone specific you wanted?”

Like people were things they could just pass back and forth, toys for them to share. It didn’t bother Sansa at all. Not the lying, not any of it. She asked, her smile falling away, “Or, where’s your friend?”

Arya couldn’t think of a single thing she wanted less than Sansa’s sloppy seconds. Would that strange thing, whatever made boys trail after Sansa, wear off mid-dance? There had to be a limit to it. Arya felt slightly ill just thinking about it.

She didn’t really want to fight with Sansa. “People danced with me,” Arya said hotly. “I’m not upset just because I lost some bizarre popularity contest and don’t have to pull someone out of my tits every five minutes.” 

And this was why she never hung out with Sansa, that disbelieving look, like the way she saw the world was right and Arya was impossibly stupid for not agreeing. She didn’t want to fight; her self-control was burned up just keeping her from embarrassing herself outside this sterile little room; she snapped, “Gods, everything is about boys with you! I just want to go home. I shouldn’t even have come.”

Now Sansa was getting really angry. Arya felt meanly glad. She didn’t want to be the only one red-faced and furious. She didn’t want another reminder that Sansa was better at this, too. She always kept her emotions under control when Arya felt like she was walking around about five seconds away from exploding.

“What,” Sansa said, teeth neat and even and white, “you’d rather be jealous at home?”

“I’m not jealous!” and the stupidly loud bathroom echoed it back at her. She wasn’t, not in the way Sansa thought. The only person in the world she’d swap places with, right that second, no matter the consequences, was in the far north, not dressed up in an unironic, unfunny costume, glaring at her from three feet away. 

Sansa was better at keeping her emotions under control, but Arya was better at this. She squared her shoulders and Sansa backed down; she showed her teeth and Sansa turned her face away, a fraction of a flinch. “You can drop me off and come back,” Arya offered, anything to get out of there. “Or one of your friends can take me. I don’t care. But please, Sansa. I want to go home.”

Even if she flinched, it was never for long. Sansa made that face she always made when she pitied Arya. She’d made it when Arya had to be homeschooled another year in primary, when Mom had to drag Arya out of the principal’s office and Sansa was waiting in the hall with the whole story already buzzed into her ear. She’d made that face basically the entire past month, and Arya was so fucking sick of seeing it.

“Just because Jon ditched you doesn’t mean you should act like the world’s ending,” Sansa sniped, and tossed her hair to fall long and pretty over her shoulder. Like Arya was a little kid who needed to be told to say _please_ and _thank you_ , like Arya’s feeling didn’t matter because she felt them too much and about all the wrong things. Sansa chided, “And you shouldn’t take it out on me, either. It’s _one_ night, Arya—so what if he didn’t want a tag-a-long?”

Only it wasn’t just one night. It was Stranger’s Night and then all of Castle Black University’s fall break because Jon wasn’t coming home for any of it. It was eighteen years of tradition blown up, and it was the phone call Arya heard Robb make to his girlfriend, and it was Mom asking, didn’t Arya have plans with her friends, like she already knew the answer and she wasn’t happy with it. It was Sansa wasting all her time on stupid guys like she couldn’t eat any boy there for lunch and acting like that was somehow better than being herself. 

It was Arya, having to come out here and spend her whole time pretending to be something she wasn’t when she felt so sickly alone, and it was knowing the whole time that this wasn’t some magical charm like it was for everyone else. She didn’t feel better. She felt worse; she felt like she could open her mouth and scream and not stop screaming until it was a howl.

It was the entire summer meaning _nothing_ to Jon when it felt like it meant everything to her.

She looked at herself in the mirror and took deep breaths. Sansa’s eyes were Tully blue, but Arya’s eyes were different, wet and glossy and wrong. She blinked carefully until it went away. She wasn’t as good as Sansa at being normal, but she wasn’t going to embarrass herself either. “Whatever,” Arya said at last and slammed the bathroom door shut behind herself.

She heard Sansa try to come after her, calling her name, but she didn’t stop. Someone else might’ve been disoriented by the pack of bodies, the dim rooms, and the obnoxious strobe lighting, but Arya had grown up twenty miles up the road at Winterfell. She’d gotten dragged to Castle Cerwyn on someone else’s playdates half her life. She was out the door in three minutes, kicking gravel up on the driveway and trying not to sink into it with the ridiculous heels Sansa had loaned her.

Gendry was the only person out under the high awning near the gate. She could smell the cigarette smoke and his cheap cologne even before she squinted the shape of him out of the shadows. He hadn’t wanted to wear a costume when she’d called and asked if he’d go, and she felt relief at it now, that he was just wearing his old grody leather jack instead of dressing up like an ass.

It made him familiar. Arya needed familiar things—her hands were tight fists and her teeth felt wrong in her mouth. Sansa was a bitch whenever they fought, and it never seemed to hit her the same way, but it made Arya stagger off feeling wrong under her skin.

There was no one else as familiar as Gendry, not unless they were a Stark. He was the guy at the bike shop, the grumpy lifeguard at the community pool. Arya’d tutored him through biology and anatomy, four years his junior and scattering chip crumbs across all his textbooks. It hadn’t felt like a lie when he’d said she must want to be a doctor, and she’d never had to say anything back. 

He knew her, at least a little more than the rest of her friends did. She lied to him less—his sense of bullshit was _astounding_. He held his cigarette out to her without her needing to ask, and she put her mouth where his had been, spit and shitty beer, a taste she might have half-imagined if not for how furious and wild her heart kicked. 

The air was cleaner out here. Under the smell of body and smoke, it smelled like tree rot, sweet and soothing. Arya inhaled smoke until she was dizzy with it.

There was nothing else, no buzz, no sense of calmness. She drank because other people were drinking; she smoked when other people smoked. The act, the motion of it calmed her, but nothing else.

She needed familiar things. “Alright?” Gendry asked as she passed the cigarette back. He took it, turned to face her, put an arm up against the wall above her head. 

“Fine,” Arya said and stepped back a little until she had space enough to breathe. She _didn’t_ need a body thick with meat standing so close to her, almost above her own. It offended him, it always did, but she moved away all the same. Gendry made a scoffing noise, straightening again, and she said before he could make some joke about her virtue, “You know I don’t like it when you loom.”

He stopped frowning and laughing. “Because you hate being reminded that you’re short,” Gendry agreed.

Arya was so far from the mood where she liked that kind of joke, and she showed him her teeth. The kick she aimed at his ankle was meant to be a warning shot, but she was falling apart at the seams. She hit him more viciously than she meant to. 

He barked out a pained noise, and she felt satisfaction coil heavy in her gut. He couldn’t run if his leg was broken—he’d taste different under the chemical stink. It took a second for guilt to follow, and she swallowed hard when it did. Gendry was her friend, and he knew her better than the rest of her friends did, but that didn’t mean she could afford to forget. 

They play-fought sometimes, but he wasn’t a Stark—he didn’t have Rickon as a brother. Bruises and scrapes and bite-marks weren’t what he looked for in a relationship. They didn’t mean the same to him.

And the rest—she wasn’t supposed to think like that.

“Sorry,” she said and moved a little closer in apology. She was apologizing; when he slung an arm over her shoulders this time, she let him.

Gendry let it go. “Thought it was a joke when you called,” he said companionably. “You never have plans on Stranger’s Night.”

“Someone has to pass out candy,” Arya said, staring out past the gate, the ancient portcullis raised to let people in, to let people out. “Or else we’d all have to pull toilet paper off the battlements in the morning.” Somewhere out in the trees, a night bird was singing.

If Castle Cerwyn was the perfect place for parties, Winterfell would have made an amazing haunted house, but Arya had never bothered to even ask. Her dad hated all the stories about their home—he hated the stories about the woods around it. “There’s no such things as ghosts,” he’d told Rickon when he and Mom were loading them both up in the car.

They went trick-or-treating in White Harbor because the sidewalks there were better for Bran. It was his last year, and Arya knew he’d rather go to his science club’s party but Rickon had begged him and he’d folded like a wet paper bag.

“It’s cool that you’re getting out this year,” Gendry said. “Did your brother stay home for you, or—”

Because for the last four years, that had been her Stranger’s Night. It was _Sorry, I have plans_. It was shitty horror movies on crackling VHS tapes, and too salty popcorn, and her favorite person sliding Arya’s legs off his lap with an exaggerated groan every time the doorbell rang.

She could just let it hang there. Gendry was her friend because he never pressed her. He’d change the subject in a second, no matter how curious he was or how irritated he sounded saying, _brother_.

Lying was a filthy habit, but they’d never been punished for it. Every time Mom had tried, Dad had another shouting match with her, and she gave in. It made Arya sick having to do it. She said, “Robb drove up to Deepwood Motte. They’re doing some bonfire thing up there.”

Gendry was tense against her. It made her tense with sympathy, worse than she ever did with Sansa. “You can come around tomorrow—you probably won’t even need a ladder to get the eggs off the windows,” Arya muttered.

“If there’s anything left when those kids are through,” Gendry said back and squeezed her against him. “I heard trick-or-treaters can get pretty vicious when the full-size candy bars dry up.”

She laughed and rested her forehead for a second against his side. The human ribcage had twenty-five bones if you didn’t count the spine, and all of them were shaped to protect the soft inner organs. Leaning against him, it seemed impossible for the sheer bulk of Gendry’s body to go crashing down. It was unthinkable that someone could touch his ribs and crack him open. 

“Don’t know if I said,” he went on. “Nice costume. It looks good on you.”

Sansa had flipped half a dozen cheap costumes, still in their packaging, across Arya’s bed. _She’d_ been dressed in some flouncy thing, petal white and crimson red, that had Robb burst out laughing when he saw it. 

Arya’d picked her own costume with her eyes closed. It was a witch, of course. She’d always felt like a harbinger of bad luck just by existing—why not let the rest of the world see it too? She’d let Sansa hook her into the blouse with her face turned away from the mirror, held still for the cool lipstick and powder Jeyne Poole had brushed across her face.

She didn’t have whatever Sansa did—she didn’t have lovesick boys banging on her door shouting her name—but Arya wasn’t an idiot. She knew that Gendry wanted to fuck her; she knew he’d date her if she asked him to. He didn’t stare at her, he wasn’t gross about it, but Arya was a girl. She knew.

Gendry was a palisade wall against the world. He was a good person, under the permanent scowl. He worked weekends volunteering at a community garden; he wrote scathing letters to government officials. He knew her the best of her friends, and she loved him the best of her friends. It would be so much easier if Arya could just love him the right way.

They weren’t dating, though. He’d tried once to ask her out, and she’d put her face in her hands and groaned, then picked the phone back up and asked if he’d invited Hot Pie and Lommy to the movies with them too.

She didn’t want to date Gendry. She didn’t look at him and see someone she wanted to kiss, to touch. Arya looked at him and thought things she shouldn’t, and she couldn’t ever tell him about it, because even if he was her friend, he wouldn’t understand. 

She couldn’t tell him, not even if she wanted to. 

“Are you happy you aren’t the only jackass who didn’t dress up?” she asked, and he shifted, let it drop.

“’Cause the Stranger’s about to come out of the woods, asking around for me,” he scoffed. 

She couldn’t ever stop lying to him, but she didn’t want to leave, either. Even though she stiffened every time he tucked her under his arm; even though being around him didn’t exactly help. Gendry reeked like cigarette smoke and cologne and cheap perfume from whoever he’d been kissing, her nose burning with it, and if the old gods themselves had appeared and demanded to know why exactly she wanted nothing more than to grab his arm and drag him away, she wouldn’t have been able to say.

“You know what they say about the woods,” she murmured, looking at the trees. 

“Don’t tell me that you believe that rot,” Gendry said. “What, you think it’s full of serial killers and ghosts and man-eating animals?”

They were friends, and every lie was almost the truth, and they each sat bitter on her tongue, unbelieved. “Wild animals live out there,” she said. “People _have_ died. D’you remember your history class? They found the bodies out there, too.”

“Sure,” Gendry said, and dropped the cigarette, crushing it under his foot. “Ages ago. Back when everyone used oil lamps and wood fireplaces and too many E’s at the end of their words.”

She didn’t say, _Are you sure?_ She didn’t say, _Back then, back when there stopped being wolves?_ She didn’t say, _Maybe they just stopped_ finding _them_.

Moonlight splashed down onto the driveway, competing with the fake gas lamps the Cerwyns had lined across the walls. She didn’t want Gendry, but Arya thought that if she was alone any longer, she’d chew off her own arms. 

Dad always said it was the wolf’s blood in her making her so wild. That Arya had it the same as Uncle Brandon and Aunt Lyanna had. She tried to image it, saying something like that to Gendry. _There’s wolf’s blood in me_. Would he laugh? Would he believe her?

Someone crashed open the doors and noise spilled out, high pitched electro music. She slapped her hands over her ears on instinct, then made herself lower them again. There was nothing Arya wanted less to have round two with Sansa; she turned away, into Gendry.

He was her friend. It wouldn’t be dangerous, with her. Arya had enough self-control left, scraped together from the shreds of being at the party, that she could keep herself safe. She could keep him safe. She sucked in a breath and asked, “Do you want to get out of here?”

“Babe?” a girl called, high pitched and sweet. Arya turned to look; she was staring right at them. “Babe?” she said again because she didn’t know Gendry’s name. “When are you coming back in?”

Arya was never lucky, except for when she was. It staggered her, how lucky she was then. And it was luck, to have something keeping her from making such a monumentally stupid move. It was Stranger’s Night, the moon whispering brilliancy down onto them, and she stepped away from Gendry.

He’d turned to look at the girl and Arya saw him hesitate, a glance between them. She didn’t grudge it to him; of course he did. That girl, he could take her upstairs and fuck her. He could kiss her and she’d kiss back. He could help her walk in her tottering heels, and she wouldn’t be fighting the urge to shove him away from her the whole way.

Gendry could look at a girl like that and feel a connection—even if it was just being at the same party, wanting the same thing for half an hour, for a night—and that girl would look back and feel the same.

Gendry was her friend; she loved him for how kind he was to her, even when she didn’t deserve it. He said to the girl, “Give me a second, yeah?” And then he turned to Arya and reached out a hand to cup her elbow, leaning in to say low and intimate, “Was there somewhere you wanted to—”

She couldn’t want him the right way. Arya shook his hand off. “Don’t worry about it,” she said.

She took a step away, two. The further she got from the cigarette-alcohol-skin scent of him, the easier it got. All the hair on her neck stood up as he came after her, but it was easier to stay focused when she was already in motion.

“Really,” she said and slowed so he was beside her and not behind, which helped more. Her smile was almost a smile. 

Gendry said, “Tell me you’re not going to go out there,” like she was an idiot. There was no way to pretend he was asking her something else; the portcullis was open and the woods were right there.

“Thought you said there weren’t any ghosts,” Arya said, trying not to strain forward towards the trees. The heels were worse than a hobble, but girls didn’t go barefoot on gravel the way she wanted to.

“That doesn’t mean it’s safe,” Gendry snapped. “I’m not just going to let you walk off—you’re drunk. There might be people out there—” and there was no doubt the type of people that he meant.

The girl on the steps was still waiting, swaying slightly. “You should go with her,” Arya said. “Really, it’s fine.” 

She wanted him to move. She wanted him to leave. Being trapped inside had made her stupid, but Arya was ready to be smart again. Keeping Gendry with her was dangerous; she loved him too much to risk it. She walked away, and he said behind her, “Arya. Hey, Arya!”

He was her friend, but he didn’t understand her. Arya always pulled her punches with him, kept her teeth to herself. She felt dizzy with resolve. When he tried to grab her arm, when she felt the air move and jerked out of the way, when she whipped around to stare at him, she showed him her teeth in a sharp white row. 

She didn’t have whatever Robb and Sansa did, but her look was still enough to make him lower his hand. 

Sansa would have had the words to diffuse this. Sansa never would have gotten herself in this situation to begin with. She would have taken Gendry upstairs and turned the fragile balance of their friendship into something easier to understand, to control.

The girl was still waiting on the steps, fragile-still. “Your friend is waiting,” Arya told Gendry and there was nothing in her voice at all.

“Come back inside with me,” Gendry told her. He kept his hands out, loose and easy, trying not to spook her. “There’s beer pong. There’s darts somewhere, I bet. I’m not that drunk; we could make a fortune.” His hands wavered; he held one out to her again.

Six tendons ran through the wrist. Four in the forearm, and if you severed those, you’d lose control over the hand. She touched her teeth to each other, a hard snap, and shook her head.

“And where are you going to go?” he pressed, low and unhappy. “Just come back inside.”

From the steps, the girl called out again unhappily, “Babe?”

Gendry had never been hunting before; he ran at the park near his mom’s apartment rather than using the woods trails. He’d never been told not to take his eyes off a wild animal. And Arya _felt_ wild. 

Girls didn’t run in high heels, not on loose ground like gravel. They’d be afraid of falling, of hurting themselves. But she wanted to not be there anymore, so much that the feeling of it swallowed her. Arya didn’t care anymore about what she should and shouldn’t do. The moon poured down across her right up until she disappeared past the tree line.

Behind her, Gendry shouted her name so loudly that it made her wince. He didn’t have a chance in even one of the seven hells of catching her. When the brush finally blocked out the lights from the driveway, she put her back to a tree and peeled off the heels, digging her thumb into the blister they’d ground into her foot. 

“Arya!” Gendry shouted again, pissed. He’d never been in the woods before; she could have heard him from two miles away, from ten, as he tried to fight his way through the brush behind her.

He didn’t understand her all the way. He never would. He’d have stopped trying if he did because he’d know he couldn’t catch her no matter how hard he tried.

No one could catch her unless she wanted them to. Arya was the worst of her siblings at so many things, but she was the best at this. When Arya walked in the woods, she walked silent. When she ran, she was the fastest. Her voice was the loudest when she sang, and her eyes the keenest, her nose the best. Getting lost was a thing that happened to other people. She turned towards Winterfell and put her bare feet into the cool damp humus, kicking up leaf litter on purpose just to fill the air with the good scent of rot. 

Stranger’s Night was the second full moon of fall, and moonlight the same wet glistening color of raw fat was falling through breaks in the canopy where the oak and elm trees had dropped their leaves. People came to Castle Cerwyn to party, but sometimes they left the castle to hang out in the cold, smoking or fucking or trying to set things on fire. Arya knew it didn’t have the same appeal if they could do those things inside, safe in the knowledge that Cley was too fucked up himself to try and stop them. She knew that was why her dad never said anything, even though he knew about the parties since Cley had started them in high school.

The air didn’t feel like there were people out there with her. It felt crystalline smooth, empty of everything except the scent of the trees in her mouth, her nose.

But the noise behind her still started again, less loudly. If Gendry was sober enough to be careful, he was sober enough to turn around and get his own ass home. Arya muttered, “Gods damn it,” to herself and went a little faster. She didn’t care if he got lost in the woods. She didn’t care if he spent all night out there—she just wanted him, wanted _everyone_ —to leave her alone.

The wind creaked through the trees. Whoever walked behind her kept coming, a slow steady pace. Her heartbeat picked up, her breaths coming faster. He shouldn’t be so unconcerned. He shouldn’t be unafraid. Gendry didn’t believe in serial killers in the woods. The only ghosts he thought about came on the tv, or the haunted house Hot Pie had dragged them to last year. But he knew wild animals lived out here.

She stopped and heard the footsteps behind her stop. “Just piss off, alright?” she shouted. “I’m not going back.”

A long silence. She looked back over her shoulder, squinting at the shadows. “I mean it, Gendry!” she cried out. “Just leave me alone!”

He didn’t say anything. Shouldn’t he be shouting her name? Her limbs tensed, sweat prickling at the base of her spine. People shouldn’t go into the woods because it was dangerous out there. Arya licked her teeth, tightened her grip on the shoes, nervous about losing them, then bolted.

He chased her. Whoever was there gave up any pretence of subtlety and came crashing after her louder than a boar through a thicket. She skidded across the damp ground, barely kept her feet from flying out from under her, and dodged through a stand of weirwood saplings, feeling the sharp leaves cut her bare arms and legs as she went.

Her heart hammered wildly, the same crazy pound of it she’d felt when she’d been surrounded by strangers and with the lights going dark again and again. The people around her had heard the music; she’d felt the vibration of a hundred lungs, fifty hearts, the furious ecstatic pounding of them all blurring the line for her between excitement and fear.

She’d been mad with it then. She carried it with herself now, that bubbling feeling in her chest, the strength of her legs, the flutter of her hair behind herself like a flag in the wind.

Absurdly, she wanted to laugh.

She took in cold air and exhaled heat, not feeling the scratches, not feeling the tightness of her legs, forced so suddenly into a sprint. Small discomforts stopped existing; Arya was in the woods, and she was running, and the only reason she was being chased was because she hadn’t decided to turn around yet.

She didn’t head for Winterfell. There wasn’t anything there for her. The castle was empty, the lights all turned off to keep trick-or-treaters from rattling at their gate. She turned to the deeper forest instead, further away from the road. The trees here were denser, and the ones that dropped their leaves had failed to thrive. 

Thick pines, and ironwood trees, and dense firs blocked out everything but the smallest scraps of moonlight. Gendry had said, _There might be people out there_. In the woods, running, baiting someone, Arya didn’t feel ashamed to think about it. In every exhaled, tightly controlled pant was the word— _Good_.

Her eyes were damp, glossy with excitement. Nothing could hide from her in the shadows. If she’d looked down instead of throwing an excited glance over her shoulder, Arya would have seen the rotting tree trunk that caught her foot and sent her flying.

She tumbled down, caught herself in a roll, and scraped her hands so deeply on tree roots that the hot bitter sting of it stunned her. The air was gone from her lungs. She lay there for a moment, panting, before she scrambled to her feet.

The high heels had only fallen a few feet away. She picked them up, weighed one in her left hand, and stared into the dark. She was getting blood smeared across the fake patent leather; Sansa would kill her if she found out; something collided before her with the harsh _bang!_ of wood on wood.

The only reason Arya ever got chased was because she hadn’t turned around and charged yet. She threw the shoe in her hand in the direction, as hard as she could, a good strong blow that connected with an equally as furious bang.

She’d expected a pained cry. She’d expected the sound of something solid hitting flesh. She peered into the dark, feeling her eyebrows knotting up.

“Don’t know how you’re going to find that again,” Jon said from his lean against the spruce tree a dozen steps from hers. He tossed a pinecone hand to hand, grinning at her so charmingly. “Who’s Gendry?” he asked like he’d never met him, like remembering the name of the guy Arya hung out with, the guy who hated him, was so far beneath Jon that he hadn’t even tried.

He’d probably been following her from the driveway. Her heart slammed; she chucked the other shoe at him on instinct.

It didn’t land; Jon batted it away and dropped the pinecone to the forest floor. The banging noise, she realized, had been one of those shitty tricks he was so fond of.

Arya was faster, louder, better. But she ran on instinct; Jon out-thought her every single time. 

“Oh, you _asshole_ ,” Arya said, and she was moving to meet him, she was moving to hit him—

He took the blow to his shoulder with a grunt and used it to get in close, slinging his arms around her. And it was instinct and sense-memory to squirm in close, to breathe in the scent of him in big huffing gulps, to let him get his arms around her. A bear hug and she kicked at his shins halfheartedly. He smelled like rotting leaves, like the woods, like clean sweat. He was laughing low and muffled into her hair, and when she bit Jon, a sharp nip to his neck, he let go of her enough that she could jerk away.

She’d left a red mark on his skin. “What was that for?” he demanded, slapping a hand to it, but he hadn’t stopped smiling. It always made her want to smile, too. She laughed at his face, so offended even though he’d been the one trying to scare the shit out of her. 

“What are you going here?” she asked back. There really wasn’t a way to find the other shoe. She kicked the second high heel into some brush, feeling too shy to stare at him and too unwilling to look away.

“Being a delinquent,” Jon said. “Fucking up your hands. I stopped ‘cause they’re bleeding. Lemme see them, little sister.”

She’d forgotten the scraps. “It doesn’t even hurt,” she said, offering him her palms, and her breath caught in her throat as he grabbed them. Jon looked at her for a second, a long burning look, then he bent his head and kissed the thin red marks. He nuzzled his cheek to them until they were burning and licked hot and wet at the droplets of blood.

It was hard to think when he put his mouth on her. It was impossible to breathe. Kissing her hands made it hurt worse, her heartbeat ratcheting up, and she never wanted him to stop. 

Wanting it, enjoying it made her fiercely embarrassed. People didn’t do this. Arya tried not to feel it. She swallowed wetly, and she let him. She could look at him at least, a handful of seconds without him looking back.

Jon _was_ dressed for lurking in the dark—dark jeans, a dark jacket. Beat up sneakers because he had trouble making noise on purpose, and his loudness had been just a way to rile her up. He kissed her wrists and ran his tongue across her pulse point, left then right. And then he looked up, his mouth so red, and pink smears across his cheeks.

Silence. Her breathing was slow, deliberate. Her heartbeat was pained. Jon said, “I was looking for you. I went home and you weren’t there, so I called Robb. He said you went out, with _Sansa_.”

He raised his eyebrows like it was a joke and he was waiting for her to tell him the punchline. It stung that he thought it was so ridiculous that Arya might have plans, might go to a party. He’d kissed her hands and thought she’d just melt for him. Arya tugged her hands away sullenly and shrugged back.

Jon blew out air. “Alright,” he said. “I’d ask if you were just running together, but…”

Like Sansa hadn’t announced she’d grown out of that years ago. Like Arya wasn’t wearing a witch costume with a skirt that just barely covered her ass. She could smell the smoke on her clothes still, and other people where they’d brushed against her, and she knew Jon could do the same. 

She wanted him to know. She wanted it to make him crazy. He must have showered before he drove down or after he’d gotten there because if he’d walked up to her with someone else on his skin, she’d known. Maybe he was hiding it, coming to her smelling like the woods and like himself. Maybe he thought she was stupid for him, but Jon was wrong about that.

She wasn’t stupid, she was just fucked up.

And not even enough to let him make her feel like this, like she’d done something wrong. His look was hot anger, and he didn’t bother to contain it, let it fill the set of his shoulders, his hands. She made her own shoulders unhunch and said hotly, “Sorry I didn’t hang around on the _slightest_ off-chance you’d come home.”

She saw his mouth go soft, but he’d been the one to ditch her. He didn’t get to feel hurt. “Baby,” he said and Arya decided he didn’t get to coax her either.

“I’m going home,” Arya announced, furious, and turned to point herself towards Winterfell. “Are you coming or not?”

At least he was quiet while he walked next to her. She and Jon didn’t have to talk to understand each other, and Arya liked it most of the time, but she also wasn’t pissed at him most of the time. Now she couldn’t avoid knowing what he was thinking, what he was saying with how careful he held out his hand to her, to help her climb over another fallen tree. 

It was an old sentinel pine rotting itself to the forest floor, the wood cracked and slick with moss. He pressed his fingertips to her wrist, cool with his dried spit, and he held her so lightly that she could pull away whenever she wanted. “I’m fine,” she snapped and shook his touch off her skin.

“You don’t seem fine,” Jon told her. He shoved his hands into his jacket pockets and cracked his neck. If he was still angry himself, he was doing a good job hiding it. “You seem—”

 _Pissed_ , Arya thought. He said, “Sad.”

The moonlight dripped down around them. The forest was as familiar as anything, as familiar as Winterfell. They’d played in it as children, hunted the animals that lived there. They’d all been running wild half the time with dirty feet and scratched faces. They’d played knights and dragons and wildlings as kids until they were exhausted, and then they’d denning down for naps in puppy piles in the root hollows of trees. 

Everyone knew the woods were dangerous. They’d been raised to know it.

If the forests around Winterfell always meant _home_ , Jon always meant _safe_. “You can tell me,” he said, not looking at her, just staring ahead. “The other stuff, it doesn’t change anything. You can always tell me about whatever’s bothering you.”

 _The other stuff, like you ditching me?_ She wanted to ask. _Like ignoring my calls and telling Robb you had a girlfriend again, and not coming home? All that really doesn’t mean everything’s changed?_

But she knew that wasn’t what he meant. Jon was talking about everything they’d done to each other over the summer. He meant that spending three months kissing every chance they got, like they were starving for each other, hadn’t changed anything. 

Arya used to think of it as dating, what they’d done. He’d taken her hiking, four hours in the car to the mouth of the White Knife then six hours on the trail, all of it just to see the waterfalls. Standing under them, he’d framed her face in his hands and pressed his lips to hers like he loved her. 

Now, thinking about it all made a hand clench tight in her belly. “It’s nothing,” she said, low. 

He said, “Arya.” And she wanted to stand still and turn into him. She _wanted_ to shove her face against his neck and put her mouth on the red mark she’d left there. She wanted to ask why he didn’t want her anymore.

Arya wasn’t stupid, though. She already knew. Whatever it was during the summer that made Jon crazy enough to want her, whatever it was that made him brave enough or stupid enough to kiss her, that thing wasn’t stronger than whatever had kept him from actually sleeping with her. The caution or the disgust, _whatever_ , was stronger than the feel of the water falling against their bodies as they sighed into each other’s mouths, tiny droplets that caught the light and threw rainbows everywhere. The noise of the waterfalls had been so loud; it must have drowned out all the thoughts in his head that he was kissing her, Arya, his little sister.

Was she crazier, that it had been months and she still didn’t care? _Jon_ and _want_ had been tied together so tightly for herself that Arya didn’t know the difference anymore. The wild things inside her, the worst things inside her, they got so loud when she was around Jon that the noise stopped registering, became silent to her own ears.

Jon had _never_ asked Arya to pretend in front of him before. He got pissy if she so much as told him a little white lie. She wasn’t going to paste on a happy face just because he felt bad about it. All they’d done was kiss, and she refused to apologize for it. He hadn’t even put his hands under her shirt or under her pants—not even when she’d rubbed against him and begged,

She’d hated it then that he’d only rubbed her back until she stopped whining for it. Now she was grateful, in an ugly kind of way. Kissing wasn’t illegal. It was nothing. They could pretend that it had never even happened.

They _should_ pretend. So what if Jon had ditched her? He didn’t owe her anything and the sooner Arya got over it, the better off they’d be. Having Jon, even for a day, wasn’t worth losing him, she told herself.

“I hate it,” she muttered at the same time as he said, “So, Cley Cerwyn’s party—”

She snorted, offended. He was already saying gently, “No, you go ahead,” and Arya said over him, loud and obnoxious, “ _Don’t_ start. I’m going to university next year, it’s not like Sansa dragged a middle-schooler out there. It’s not like she took _Rickon_.”

“No, she just took you,” Jon shot back, and now she could hear how irritated he was. “After I specifically told her not to.”

Had he texted Sansa? Had _Sansa_ texted _him_? She wanted to cover her face; she wanted to scream. Either thought was unbearable.

“You told her not to! Gods, did you want me to be miserable?” He wasn’t walking anymore. She pulled ahead and turned around to face him. “Is that it? You hate being at Castle Black, so you want me to hate it here? Real fucking mature, asshole.”

“I wanted you to be safe,” Jon bit out, and his eyes were hard. “I didn’t want you getting into stupid shit without me there to look after you.”

She didn’t need a babysitter. “It’s a party!” Arya cried and threw her hands up. “It’s not like a serial killer’s going to come busting in!”

“That isn’t what I meant,” Jon said furiously, and she stared at him. A thought came then, small and bitter and horrible.

Jon had always looked after her. He was so protective, and never in the cloying untrusting way that Mom and their Dad were. He’d never once in her life refused her something like this, only went along with her. And she’d thought, egotistically and stupid as it now seemed, it was because he wanted to be with her. He wanted her company, at least. “You don’t trust me,” she said now. “You don’t— you didn’t think I could do it, did you? Go to a party without you holding my hand—”

His eyes went wide. “No, you _know_ I don’t—” Jon started to say, but she shook her head so hard she got dizzy.

“Well guess what,” Arya seethed. “I couldn’t, okay? I tried it and I was fucking miserable, so I guess you win!”

Even the cricket noise dimmed. Her shout washed everything away; she wrapped her arms around herself and looked past Jon, up over his shoulder. The moon glared back, harsh and accusing. It was so easy for everyone else, and she always thought that Jon knew, that he understood. He’d stayed in fencing well into high school, same as her. He’d been at home a year longer as a kid, same as her. Dad had exploded when Jon applied to Castle Back and nowhere else, trying to force his hand in Jon’s sneaky clever way, and she’d found Jon sitting on the roof of the cracked Maester’s Tower, smoking grimly. He’d turned his cheek into her hand when she’d touched him and they’d shared a look that didn’t need any words.

Arya didn’t have whatever Robb and Sansa did, and she always thought, _Neither does Jon_. She’d always thought, _Thank you, gods, for making me this way but not making me be alone_.

“Cley Cerwyn’s a shithead,” Jon said, harsh, cutting through the silence. He reached for her, then thought better and dropped his hand. “He’s a dick, and his friends are all dicks, and I don’t want you hanging out with them when they’re fucked up. I don’t want you getting into something when you can’t fight back. When I’m not there to fight back for you.”

A boy broke another boy’s arm and it wasn’t great, but it wasn’t rumor-worthy. A girl broke a boy’s arm, and suddenly Arya had to see the school counselor, had to apologize, had to hear Dad talking down the parents using words like _lawyer_ and _self defense_ and _history of sexual harassment_. Arya broke a boy’s arm and suddenly her girl friends didn’t want to sit with her anymore, not even Jeyne Heddle, who was the one he’d grabbed in the first place. 

Jeyne still wouldn’t look her in the eye, and that had been five years ago.

She chewed her lip. Jon was breathing hard, turned to the side, showing her his neck, his shoulder, his back. Apologizing to her.

He was so close. She ached to touch him, to lean into him. Arya put her hand on his back, wound it into the rough canvas of his jacket. “I hated it,” she muttered. “I just wanted to be home. I just wanted—” _you to be home_ , and she couldn’t say it.

Jon said, “Tormund and I hit up a thrift store in Mole’s Town. He gave me so much shit for buying _When Mutant Direwolves Attack_ on tape. But I saw it, and I thought of you, and I knew I had to come.”

She didn’t want to be an obligation. She didn’t want him to leave her. “I’m still pissed at you,” she said and came close enough that she could press her face to his back.

His heartbeat was just under her cheek. Twenty-four bones made up the ladder of the ribs, not counting the spine and sternum, and she touched them through his back, counting them off. She’d learned anatomy from Jon’s body, back when they were just kids. To think about bone, muscle, vein—it was thinking about him.

“I know,” Jon said. He couldn’t reach for her like this, and he didn’t want to scare her off by trying. He kept twitching, and it made her breath come faster. Through his jacket, she pressed her teeth to his shoulder blade. A bite without a bite. He exhaled hard and said, “I’m sorry.”

Mouth open, jaw aching, she slurred, “Don’t make me pretend that I’m not mad.”

He breathed in, out. It was a shaky fragile sound. “I’m so sick of pretending to be something I’m not,” Arya told the superficial muscles of his back. Trapezius, latissimus dorsi, levator scapulae, rhomboid major, and rhomboid minor. A hunter would call that cut the backstrap. She touched her fingers to the pieces of him one by one.

Jon said, hoarse and angry, “Who’s been making you pretend?”

It used to be dresses and the sept in Wintertown and pigtails. Everything pink, like pink wasn’t just washed out red, wasn’t washing her hands in the kitchen sink in the morning and seeing thin ribbon trails of color in the water spiraling down the drain. Arya ran away when Jon first went to university. Six days and Dad had dragged her home with a hand tight on the back of her neck.

She didn’t have whatever Robb and Sansa had. She couldn’t fake it well enough to make everyone happy with her, and Dad had yelled at Mom for so long that _Arya_ had started crying, crammed filthy and blanket-wrapped in the chair in his office. It had been better after that, but it hadn’t been _good_.

It was never good. It made her so tired; it made her so angry. It ran her ragged, all the lists and rules and the common sense everyone else seemed to have about it. No one else seemed to struggle like she did. “Arya,” Jon said, a low rumble against her cheek, her chest where she shoved herself against him. “Who?”

“Everyone,” she said and shut her eyes. She didn’t want him to leave her; she couldn’t live the rest of her life in the woods the way they’d all done as children, as stupid wild things. It was something she was supposed to grow out of, and everyone’s disappointed looks said it.

Arya had the wolf’s blood in her. How was she supposed to grow out of her own blood? “Gods,” and she sucked in air, “everyone. All the time, and I just can’t—”

He moved away from her, three big steps. Her front was cold the second he did it, her cheek, her whole body. It hadn’t been so bad inside, but goosebumps snaked up her bare legs now and scattered across her stomach.

The best way to keep warm was to keep moving. Some days it felt like Arya had been born to run, it was so good and natural to her. Some days it felt like she’d never be fast enough.

She licked her mouth, traced her teeth with her tongue. Jon was still facing away from her, trying not to crowd her. He bent down and took off his shoes. “Think I could find them again?” he asked thoughtfully, weighed them in his hand, and threw them into the dark without waiting for an answer.

She loved him so much. She’d been sick with it even before last summer. Every time he’d come home, it was like re-breaking the same bone until it healed unbearably brittle and likely to shatter at a touch. Jon was tall and strong and handsome, and the more he stayed away—the freer he felt—the worse it got, like some disgusting crawling thing finally climbing out of a cocoon with stunning, hauntingly beautiful wings. It got better, it got worse, and Arya was helpless before it. Jon was in her bloodstream. He was in her bones. She wanted him, and it was a miracle he’d wanted her back even for a little while.

Barefoot, he was just as silent as her. A ghost in the woods. Arya was supposed to grow out of things like this—she was supposed to come in from the trees one day and not go out again—but she needed this like air. Jon said, turning back to her, “I should give you a head start. You know, since your legs are so much shorter.”

Her heart hammered in her chest. The air was sweeter, tree-rot and dirt and the moldering wood of downed branches. “I’m not short,” Arya said, shifting slowly, trying not to give herself away. Jon had taken fencing too, for years after Sansa and Robb had given it up. Hips and shoulders and feet, they were all a language he spoke.

“Are you sure?” he asked, cocking his head to the side. He raised his eyebrows, friendly, dickish. “You wore those shoes too long, baby. Give you an extra inch and you get all confused.” 

His grin changed his whole face, all teeth and swoon-worthy dimples, and even if he didn’t want her, she still had this. She could make him smile just by speaking, by making a face.

“Ass,” she said, and he’d been poised to spring, to come after her; Jon shouted out in surprise when she ran at him and just past, his hand a hot glance off her wrist and too slow by a bare second.

Laughing was a waste of breath. Arya hugged it to herself instead, a kernel of warmth to slip down her spine. Someday she was going to come in from the trees, and someday Jon was going to leave Winterfell and he’d never come back to her again. It was how things worked; Winterfell was Robb’s by right, and Arya could stay if she wanted, and Sansa, and even Bran, but Jon would go.

Robb wouldn’t make him, but Jon had picked Castle Black because it was the farthest you could go while still being in the North. She knew him; she wasn’t stupid. He loved it up there and Arya used to think she’d join him, had printed out the application for East Watch without thought, but there was no point chasing after him like this. No point if it would be down to a fight, trying to keep her teeth in his neck and him all the while trying to get away.

She loved him too much. She was going to lose him. It ached, deep and hurtful, a stitch in her side that she tried to shake out with every pounded step.

She was losing him, but she still had this for now. She was faster than him. She knew the woods better. If he ran from her tonight, she could catch him, and if she fled, he’d be lost, stalking in circles and shouting her name. He’d taken something away from her when he’d just abandoned her like that but the night, the moon, the chase was giving it back.

The trees flowed past her. Little streams crisscrossed everywhere around them, and dry washes with only a little growth, barren places the snowmelt would crash through. She staggered down the bank of one, felt the dirt cool on her feet, powdery dust around her ankles, and squinted in the sudden light.

The trees didn’t cross over her head. The moon melted down, warm and sweet and it felt so good on her face, that light. Her legs were warmed up now. She could run forever if she wanted to.

It was some other girl who caught her skirt on the brush and jerked away with a tear splintering across it. Some other girl tripped and caught herself on a tree branch and left little wet red marks where the scabs had been roughed away. It didn’t matter what sort of trail Arya was leaving behind herself.

The only reason she was being chased was because she hadn’t turned around yet. And she might not. She might stay running. She might slow, a steady jog, no pain in her side, and air still coming in easy to her lungs. There were wild animals in the woods, everyone knew that. It made it dangerous to go out there if you didn’t know what you were doing.

Arya had grown up under these trees. 

There was a hollow where the wash ended. A wide broad bowl, a melt-pond in spring now filled with soft grass just going dry in the cold nights. Jon was silent, but he wasn’t a ghost. She could hear him breathing, stalking, and she pretended not to. She slowed her steps further.

She’d _wanted_ to throw him when he lunged. Her plan had been to knock him forward over her shoulder and watch all the air rush out of his lungs. She wanted him looking up at her as she stepped over and past him. But he hit her low, arms hard around her waist, pinning her own arms to her side, and he knocked her to the ground instead.

They hit hard and rolled. The grass pressed down all around them and gave out a scent as bright and clean as dried hay. Arya thrashed against Jon, kicked him savagely, and laughed as he said, “Fuck!” and tried to shove her wrists down to the ground.

She didn’t have to be careful with Jon. She could hurt him if she wanted to, and all he’d do was bite back. She didn’t have to control herself and that made it sweeter to spread her legs a little and feel him settle between them. He was hard—friction, adrenaline—getting him going. She knew she shouldn’t but Arya rocked against it, feeling her skirt get shoved up with the motion, feeling the roughness of his jeans against the soft skin of her inner thighs.

“Fuck,” Jon said again, lower, deeper. He rocked back, dragging himself against her where she was getting wet. He rubbed hard against the little scrap of cotton she’d thrown on without thought. The only protection it had offered before was that if she bent over, no one could look directly at her ass. It offered _no_ protection now. She shuddered at the pressure, the slow filthy grind, and bit down a moan.

She couldn’t tell him that she loved him. He wanted to leave her; the moon was making them both insane; he’d roll off her and away if he stopped to think about it. She cringed under the pressure, the _pleasure_ , so good that her whole spine was hot with it, her neck down to the dip of her lower back.

She didn’t have to pretend that she didn’t want to bite him. She’d put her teeth into the muscles of his thighs, right about the arteries hiding there. She’d peel away the muscles of his back, the ropey muscles of his chest covering his ribs and heart. His belly was all hard lines over soft organs. She wanted to roll him over and sink her teeth in.

“Everyone but you,” Arya gasped out thoughtlessly and dug her heels into the ground. She shoved herself up against him, meeting him thrust for thrust.

Jon made a noise low in his throat. He held her wrists with one hard hand and planted the other next to her cheek. The muscles of his arm flexed; his eyes were half-closed and fully liquid brilliance in the light.

“Everyone wants me to pretend,” Arya said. He rocked into her again, kept on her, kept the pressure there until he was just grinding their hips together slow and filthy and perfect. She didn’t dare wrap her legs around him. She moaned, “Everyone but you.”

He lowered his head and kissed her. Jon never kissed her chastely, and now it was like he was trying to eat her alive. Arya rubbed her tongue against his, bit back at him, moaned low in her throat as he sucked on her upper lip.

It wasn’t until he took his hand off her wrists, until he cupped her hipbone through two useless layers of tulle and one of cheap cotton, so gentle like she was precious, that she remembered.

Acid crept up her throat. Her arms were free, her feet flat to the ground. It was a second’s work to shove herself over and roll them. 

She put her hands on Jon’s chest, staring down at him. Arya wasn’t stupid except when it came to Jon. Jon was all of her worst decisions at once, but she couldn’t do this. He grabbed at her hips and grinned up at her with a curl falling sideways across his forehead, so familiar and sharply handsome and confident that he could have her, and she said furiously, “Are you going to tell your girlfriend about that?”

His hands tightened on her hips. His cock was hard against her ass, thick under his jeans. She shoved back a little, until she was perching more on his knees than his hips and glared at him. His mouth was red, his hair in his face. “What?” Jon asked thickly, so confused it practically dripped off of him.

“Don’t play stupid,” she said and smacked at his chest. She didn’t have to pull her punches; they both rocked with the force of it.

“I’m not!” he said and blinked up at her. “Arya, what’re you—”

“Don’t lie to me either,” she snapped. It wasn’t fair that he could blink up at her with thick dark lashes and a mouth so hot, a mouth that butter wouldn’t melt in. She wanted to crack open his ribs and tear him apart. “I heard Robb on the phone—” she snarled.

“Not with me,” Jon was fast to say. “I haven’t called him in weeks—”

She talked over him, pointedly loud. “—and he told his girlfriend what you told him.”

Arya swallowed down any thickness in her throat. It wasn’t enough to look at him anymore. She loved him too much to hate him. She felt oily and disgusting just pinning him down. She looked up at the sky, struggling to control her breathing until her eyes stung less. 

“Arya,” Jon said, low and soft and tender and reasonable, so reasonable and she _hated_ him for it, “tell me what he said.”

Jon was at his most dangerous when he was mild and pleasant. “He said you had a girlfriend,” she hissed, feeling venomous, and scrubbed her wrist across her nose before it could drip. Her nasal cavity stung worse than her eyes, tight pressure right before tears. “He said you were staying behind at break to spend time with her. He said you were finally getting _laid_.”

She didn’t look back down until she heard his head thud against the ground, the low groan he let out. “I’m going to take his fucking head off,” Jon said, just as furious as her, and gave a disbelieving snort. “Is that why you’re so pissed at me? I’m going to tear his fucking kneecaps off and shove them down his _throat_.”

Was he angry that Robb had told her? Or rather that she’d heard it—Robb hadn’t even known she was there. “ _You_ should have told me about her,” Arya muttered, “instead of just ditching me. _You_ said it didn’t change anything—you would‘ve told me if you _meant it_.”

“There wasn’t anything to tell!” and he sounded furious, forceful, _certain_. Jon moved her off of him, hands steady on her hips. It made her so stupidly hot that he could just lift her and toss her around. He set her down with exaggerated care, and she tried to force the sensation of it out of her head.

She sat there in the grass and chewed her lip. Jon sat up and shifted closer, reached out to take her hands. He’d sounded so certain. She let him. There was dirt under her fingernails and scabs across her knuckles and palms. Jon’s hands were just as rough, but his own fingernails were filed down to the thinnest of clean pale half-moons. She tried not to think about it even as she flushed.

“I don’t have,” Jon said with force, “a _girlfriend_. I told him I had a girl,” and that’s what he called Arya, _my girl. That’s my girl, how’s my girl_ , and once when she’d called him, he’d taken the phone away from his face long enough to shout at someone, _Will you shut the fuck up! I’m trying to talk to my girl!_

Jon waited until she looked up at him, a fast glance at the lines at the corner of his mouth. He frowned too much, Arya thought. He said, “And I said that mostly to get him to stop trying to set me up.”

“ _Mostly_ ,” Arya told their hands, ducking her head. Her heartbeat was a rabbit’s, pitifully fast.

“Yeah, mostly,” and he squeezed her fingers. “Because I do have a girl. She, gods, she’s the sweetest thing, and so good to me. So patient. And when I kiss her, she makes this noise—”

Arya tried to jerk her hands away, a high embarrassed squeak slipping out, but Jon held tight as a vice. “—just like that, yeah. And if I tell my brother that,” he said patiently, “if I told him any of that, he’d try to beat me to death with a tree branch, and I’d have to let him, baby.”

She wasn’t stupid. Tension leaked out of her spine like water from a tap. She said, “And getting laid?” mostly just to see what he would say. Mostly to give her time to blink water off the tips of her eyelashes.

He flushed. Jon _flushed_. He cleared his throat and stroked his thumb across the back of her hand. “You turned eighteen last month,” he said hoarsely.

He’d called and sang her happy birthday at midnight and it had almost taken away the deep pressure-pain of how much it hurt to not have him there. And then like wicked magic he’d stopped taking her calls, stopped texting back. He’d left her on read for _two weeks_ when she’d tried to ask him about his classes. 

“And we spent all summer making out,” Arya said back. He couldn’t be mad that she was older—Jon wasn’t a creep. He couldn’t be mad at _her_ that he hadn’t been there to light her candles, like he, personally, could give her a wish. “What’s that got to do with the price of pussy in Lys?” she demanded.

It knocked the bashfulness out of him. He burst out laughing and said between big barks of it, “Don’t— ever— talk like Greyjoy again.” 

When he laughed like that with his mouth open and his eyes squinted up, she could see the person he was growing up to be. The stranger he was becoming, living most of the year so far away from her. It seemed like a miracle he could want her at all. He closed his mouth, and sighed, then said quietly, “I didn’t want to fuck you up. I didn’t want this—” _us_ “—to be something that fucked you up.”

“You wouldn’t,” Arya said back. She pulled his hands closer, she leaned in until she crashed against him and only let go of his fingers when he put his arms around her like she wanted him to. “If I said stop,” she told his chest, rubbing her cheek on his worn-out jacket, “if I didn’t like it— You’d never, okay?”

Even the thought seemed impossible. They could play-fight, they could bruise each other and leave red welts, scratches, but that didn’t hurt. That was another language, private between them, one the rest of their siblings were slowly outgrowing, but something she and Jon would always speak.

“I know,” Jon said and kissed the corner of her mouth. They shared air for a second, their lips just brushing. Her mouth was so swollen and sensitive; she shivered. He said against her skin, “Not fucked up like that.”

The night before he left—maybe three months ago—they’d laid curled together on his bed and kissed for hours. Robb and Sansa were already gone, and Bran and Rickon were back at school. Arya had ditched her classes, stupid first-day nonsense, and crawled into his bed in the still empty house, and they’d kissed until her mouth was numb. She’d wanted him so much she could have died from it. She’d peeled off her panties afterwards, so sodden they’d stuck to her skin, and she’d been so swollen even that ghost of a touch had ached. 

Three months, and it hadn’t changed anything for her. It seemed ridiculous to her that three months could have such a significance. The clock had rolled around at midnight and she hadn’t magically become a different person. But Arya couldn’t say it was ridiculous with Jon looking at her like that, like just thinking about it hurt him. 

She was fucked up over Jon, but it wasn’t something he’d _done_ to her. She hadn’t ever woken up one morning and decided she wanted him. It was just her, it had always been her, and she’d always looked at him and felt hungry in an entirely different way than she felt looking at anyone else. Arya couldn’t even remember when the hunger had changed—if it had ever changed—to skin-hunger, to love-sickness, to water on their skin and the world filled with nothing but noise, to getting the hell reamed out of her willingly for one last chance to kiss. 

She felt the same as she did three months ago, a year ago, four years ago, when she didn’t even know what it meant to ache between her legs. Health class and biology and the worst talk she’d ever had with her mom, and it hadn’t contextualized the feelings she had for him, what her body did for want of him. Arya’s whole life and it was just her, wanting Jon to look at her and wanting him to never look away. 

She was fucked up, and Jon was the least of it. He was the best of it. 

“So you got freaked out?” she asked, hushed. He didn’t have to be just like her, as long as he felt it too. As long as he felt it _enough_. “That’s still a shitty reason to just decide to ditch me for two months,” she told him, feeling it out. “Were you, was it a test? To see if I really wanted it?”

“No,” he said. “ _No_. I’m just a little fucked up. Didn’t you know? You can’t not know. I’ve always been a little fucked up when it comes to you.” 

He leaned down and kissed her. Arya sighed, and opened her mouth for him to lick inside, and kissed him back. He wanted her; he was fucked up over wanting her. She knew she should care, but she didn’t. She was so greedy for him; she was gagging for anything he’d give her.

They pulled away after a while. He rested his forehead to hers, his eyes closed. Arya touched his cheek and said, “So be fucked up. But talk to me! Don’t just shove me away.”

He looked at her for a long time, then. His eyes were brilliant and perfect, the exact same color as hers. It used to embarrass her how often it was like that. Sometimes it still did, how hard it was to keep her eyes down every day. But like this, she loved it. She’d loved it her whole life. 

“You know how Dad came up earlier this year?” Jon murmured. “When he had that meeting in Mole Town.”

Just before her birthday. Arya remembered being pissed that he wouldn’t let her go too. She remembered afterwards better, sulking in the middle of Dad’s bed while he unpacked, and the sweatshirt Dad had dug out of his suitcase with a puzzled look. Arya’d stolen it out of the clothes hamper later, shameless. It had smelled like Jon’s sweat, his skin. 

“Yeah,” she said, dropping her eyes. It had reeked like him, so blatantly intentional, and she’d put it on over her naked skin and missed him like an ache.

“He wanted to talk to me about something,” Jon said. He thumbed her spine, stroked down one of her vertebrae over and over again, a slow touch. “And he said—” 

Jon stopped and swallowed. Arya tried to wait patiently; she touched the fragile skin just under his eye and leaned forward to run her mouth across his cheek. When she was done, he said slowly, “He told me about Uncle Brandon. About how crazy he went when Aunt Lyanna died. That’s what—”

“I felt fucked up about that,” Jon said, raw.

She hadn’t even been born when Aunt Lyanna and Uncle Brandon died. Jon hadn’t even been born, maybe. Or he’d only been a few months old at best. She didn’t know what to say, just stroked his cheek again.

“Dad said they were close,” he went on hesitantly. “That Uncle Brandon followed her south even though he should have stayed in Winterfell. And it made me think of you. Think of us.”

“I didn’t know that,” she said quietly. She knew that Dad held Winterfell because Uncle Brandon had died, but he never talked about them, not to anyone. He’d told Arya once that she looked like Lyanna and then he’d walked out of the godswood and out of the keep, and he hadn’t come home until the next morning, his feet leaving bloody footprints up the stairs and to his room. 

Winterfell was Uncle Brandon’s home—he was the firstborn. Dad should have been the one leaving. Jon turned and kissed her fingers, kissed the scabbed up mess of her palm. “I think I’d go crazy, too,” he rasped. “I thought about them, and I kept thinking, _I‘d go crazy. I’d go insane if that was my girl_.” Shaky, he said, “So don’t you do that, okay? Don’t you ever do that to me.”

It seemed absurd. People didn’t plan on car crashes. They didn’t plan on random acts of violence—Uncle Brandon had gotten caught in a shooting. Only she thought, small and terrible, _Had he?_

Jon was breathing in and out, rasping. He kept touching her back and spine and the wings of her shoulder blades like he was naming them off in his head. “Don’t do what,” she asked, “go south? Die?”

“Leave me,” and his eyes were brilliant and familiar. He was serious; Jon meant it when he said, “Don’t you leave me.”

It was a lot, to hear him say it. It was too much after so long starving for it. Misery made time stretch; a day felt like a decade. Her stomach clenched painfully. It would ruin her if he did that again. He touched the soreness of the wound, and she bit back at him like a wild animal, desperate to keep herself safe. “That’s rich, coming from you,” Arya said, high and nervous, and she tried to squirm away. But Jon had his arms around her still, and he wasn’t in the mood to let go.

“You’re the one who didn’t come home,” she went on, not looking at him. Her breaths came faster. She’d cry if she looked at him; she wanted it so much. “You just— you stopped answering my calls, and Robb said all that stupid shit, and you’re— You’re the one who’s—”

“I sent you my sweatshirt,” Jon said. “I made it smell like me—I knew you’d want it. But I couldn’t stay here with you, you _know_ that. I’m sorry I couldn’t, and I’m sorry I said I wasn’t coming home, but I just— I just needed to think about some things before I came back. Before I saw you again.”

“And what was I supposed to do?” Arya demanded. She didn’t want to fight with him, but she couldn’t stop herself anymore. She’d scraped away the last of her will-power—the words poured out of her mouth like someone else was saying them. “Was I supposed to just stay here and wait? Leave you alone while you’re off doing the bullshit figuring-stuff-out dance? When I don’t know if you’re going to break up with me?”

It was such a stupid shallow word. What they’d done went past dating. Who they were to each other went past concepts like that. If he left, he’d take her with him, all the soft organs tucked up inside her chest. Two layers of muscle, two layers of skin, a thin layer of subcutaneous fat, and a whole system of ribs evolved to keep her soft insides safe, and he’d walk off with them in his hands.

“Baby,” he said, but she shook her head. She didn’t want to listen. “Arya,” and he grabbed her arms so tightly that it hurt. Arya wanted it to bruise. She wanted to keep his fingerprints on her skin, because he was going to leave. He couldn’t want it as much as she did, and he was going to leave, he was, and he said frantically, “Dad didn’t just come to talk to me. He showed me—” 

He sounded so excited when he said, “There’s people like us. Up there.”

Jon had picked Castle Black to get away from Winterfell; Arya hadn’t even known to be afraid of _this_. Acid burned her throat. “Fine,” she snapped. She turned her face away. “Whatever, go fuck one of them, and I hope you’re happy with her—” and her voice broke. She swallowed it down wetly, trying not to shudder.

“That’s not what I’m saying.” Jon was getting angry now. “Just listen to me, okay? There’s people _like us_ , Arya. Did Dad ever tell you that? They’re like _us_ , not like him. We don’t have to stay in Winterfell for the rest of our lives. We don’t have to live like this. There’s places we can go. People we can stay with, people who understand us. People who want us just like we are.”

She and Jon had never been like the rest. They didn’t have whatever Robb and Sansa did, and they couldn’t stand to be alone. They didn’t like being crammed into smaller and smaller spaces. 

You couldn’t trust someone who did nothing but lie to you. You couldn’t trust someone if you were a liar; you couldn’t even feel betrayed if they were one too. She wanted trust; she wanted people. She wanted it so badly she could taste it. She wanted it so much it hurt, a fist deep in her chest.

It was a lot. It was too much. Arya felt hollowed out, cored like an apple. She mumbled, “So we’ll just spend the rest of our lives lying to them. It’s the same.”

“We’ll tell them we love each other,” Jon said and pressed his mouth hard to hers. He said, “That won’t be a lie.”

She used to love how similar she and Jon were. They felt the same, they looked the same. They had the same eyes, always. They were the only ones to take after Dad, and it made her feel so special to share that with him. But things would be easier if she was red-haired and blue-eyed. “If they’re like us and they’re still alive, they’re not idiots,” she told him and wiped at her eyes.

Jon said, “We’ll say we’re cousins,” and then, absurdly, a little bitterly, he laughed.

She laughed back. She couldn’t help it. She was so fucked up over him, and they could lie all they wanted, but he’d always be her brother. Kissing him didn’t change that. Loving him didn’t change that. The word was too small to fit inside of it everything that he was to her, but Arya didn’t have another word to put in its place. “Jon,” she said, aching. “Winterfell is our home. Could you really just leave and never come back?”

Because they couldn’t come back if they went north together. It was hard enough now to live like this without knowing any other way. To be free of it, for a second, for a single day, would ruin her. And to reach out and take what he was promising, it would draw a line so deeply between them and the others that Arya didn’t think they could cross it back again. 

“You’re my home,” he said to her, flat and serious. “I don’t care about Winterfell.”

Jon was just like her, and he’d had that taste. She just needed to look at him to know it. Maybe hearing about Uncle Brandon and Aunt Lyanna had fucked him up, but this had too. Of course he wouldn’t give a shit about Winterfell if it was just another cage to him now.

A small and bitter voice inside her said, _You’re just like him. In this, in everything, in this_.

“I want to be where you are,” Jon said, forceful as the hands he wrapped around her hips, the hands bruising up her skin so good, “and I want us to stop having to be—”

Alone. Afraid of slipping. He said it with his body, letting her fill in the silence. He leaned down and kissed her neck; he scraped his teeth along it until she was shuddering, whimpering. She was so fucked up over him. Arya lay down, dragging him over her, tangling their legs together, letting him roll on top of her. He bit her lower lip, harsh where the skin was thin and sore, and her feet flexed, heels digging into the soft cold dirt.

“Want this with me,” he said, kissing her. He smeared the words into her mouth, all teeth behind the kiss. “Want this with me. Gods, Arya, please. Say you want this with me.”

He didn’t give a fuck about Winterfell. He’d found a way to be free that they’d never ever have here. He’d had it and it was in his hands, his spine, the confidence of his touch now. He’d had it, but he’d still come back for her. 

She didn’t want him to talk anymore. She didn’t want to have to listen to him make so much sense. All of her was bruised, wounded. Arya got a fistful of his hair and dragged Jon’s mouth back to hers, and she kept it there.

They kissed for a long time. This was familiar, it was good. Her mouth was swollen up and hot, and she licked at his teeth and his soft palate, and she felt Jon tremble above her when she dragged her nails down his back. 

And then he tilted his head a little and gentled the kiss. He drew away enough to kiss her lip, the corner of her mouth, and he was so strong that she couldn’t contain him, that both her hands in his hair was nothing, but he’d still stayed where she put him.

He’d let her savage his mouth, and now all he did was kiss the corner of hers again, then the bow of her upper lip. Arya didn’t have to pretend with Jon, but that didn’t mean he liked it. She didn’t want to give him a single excuse to stop.

Arya knew how it was supposed to go. She’d seen the stupid teen movies Sansa and Jeyne had been obsessed with, back when they were pimply freshmen, back when watching people kiss on-screen made Arya gag. It was still better than going with Jon to his practice, and acting like she wasn’t squirming in the stands the entire time, and it gave her this. If he wasn’t starving for it, she wouldn’t be either.

She kissed his mouth softly, touched her tongue to his lip, and put her arms around his neck gently. She didn’t grab him, and she didn’t dig her fingers in, just touched him with her palms sweetly. And she didn’t pout when he pulled away again, even though she wanted to. Three months of kissing was enough foreplay. 

He looked down at her, panting. And then he went on his knees between her legs, grabbing at her wrists and pinning her down. He said to her harshly, “Don’t.”

“Don’t…kiss you?” and now she was pouting. Arya didn’t know what he wanted. Maybe she never had. “Fine, let me up,” she said, arching her neck. She made it deliberately crude. She licked her bottom lip and said, “I’ll suck your dick instead.”

“Don’t pretend with me,” Jon said, and it was a low gravelly threat. “I don’t want some prom queen, or head cheerleader, or whoever the hell you’re trying to be,” he said, and gave her wrists a shake, stretched her arms above her head just a little too far. “I want _you_ ,” he said. “I just want you.”

Her breath caught in her throat. Arya swallowed and tested the grip of his hands. A skirt so short that it barely covered her ass was worth something _here_ ; her legs were free to help flip him.

She was only stupid when it came to Jon, but Jon was an idiot over her, too. He hadn’t expected her to do it again, and there was an irritated little line between his brows as they rolled. His mouth was a little open, just enough for her to put her tongue in.

Jon’s back smacked into the ground. She kept kissing him, then sat back on his hips for a second and tossed her hair out of her face. He was staring up at her with his mouth parted; Jon was stupid for her but he was fast. She tried to bolt away and he grabbed her ankle at the last second and sent her crashing to the ground.

Now she was laughing, trying to kick his face like she had before. She didn’t have to pull her punches with Jon and he didn’t bother trying either. Tension leaked out of her like sweat dripping out of her pores. He dragged her back, the dry grass shoving her skirt up over her ass and forcing the thin polyester blouse high until it was bunched under her breasts, and she saw the moment he looked at her, saw the _second_ he looked at her body the way she always wanted him to.

He’d seen her body before. He’d seen her _naked_ before. But not like this, not with intent. Arya spread her legs a little wider. There was a wet spot on her panties; she could feel the cool air touch it, sodden where it stuck to her skin.

Jon made a noise in his throat and closed his hand around her other ankle. “If you want to go back to the house,” he said, “you have to get up right now.”

She shook her head. Her hair was coming loose, falling down around her shoulders. She’d never felt each strand touch her like this before, a silky slide across her skin. Every part of her felt good, shiver-sensitive. She’d never felt _sexy_ before, but it ran through her now like something molten. Jon’s eyes on her changed everything. 

She knew it was stupid. They weren’t so deep into the woods, and it was Stranger’s Night—people were out trying to get frightened. Anyone could find them. Anyone could see. “I know it’s dangerous,” she said, “and I don’t care. I don’t care. I want it here.”

They’d grown up in the woods; Arya had never left them, not really. She knew what he was doing, and it was so dangerous to let him plead with her like this, and she _didn’t care_.

Jon said, crawling up between her knees, “Everything we do is dangerous, just because we’re dangerous. That doesn’t mean it’s a crime. That doesn’t mean we have to hate ourselves for it.” He didn’t say, _Come with me and be happy_. He didn’t need to. His hands on her knees were so gentle. He bowed his head, drew one of her legs out to the side, folded it with the pressure of a touch until her heel almost touched her ass.

She’d never felt so open before. He was looking at her, at the wet spot on her panties. When he kissed her mouth it was always all teeth. Arya should have been afraid for this kiss, but she was so tired of pretending. Fear, excitement, they all felt the same to her.

He rubbed his cheek against her thigh, smooth skin where she was red from the friction of his jeans. Jon got a five o’clock shadow about ten seconds after he stepped out of the bathroom in the morning. Had he thought about doing this? Had he shaved for her? Her gut clenched tightly.

“Please,” she said, squirming closer to him.

“Will you think about it?” Jon asked, and his mouth was so close to her. His breath was hot on her pussy through the thin cotton. He looked up at her, and her heart thumped at the sight of it, and he said, “Will you think about going with me?”

She wanted it so much. She wanted his mouth. She wanted what he was offering, but it seemed so impossible, like a dream. She wanted his mouth, and his mouth was right there, and Arya was tired of things she couldn’t have.

“Please,” Arya amended, fisting her hands in his hair and shoving him down, “stop talking.”

For once in his life, he listened to her. He’d never touched her here, not even his fingers, and now Jon was thumbing her panties to the side. She shivered. He dragged his tongue flat along her pussy and his mouth was so hot on her skin. She didn’t even try to be quiet—Arya wailed like he’d hurt her.

He pulled away a little, breathing on her, then pressed a kiss to her clit. She jerked, and he laughed. “It’s cute,” he said, looking up at her. “You’re cute here. Did you think about me when you shaved?”

“Do you care?” she demanded, mouth open and wet. She licked her own teeth and yanked at his hair until he was arching his neck into it, hissing with his eyes shut. “Do you care,” she forced out, “if I shave.”

“No,” he said and opened his eyes again to look at her. He was waiting, she realized.

Oh, but it was so dangerous to let him do this. He wanted to give her what she wanted, even if he couldn’t help being an ass about it.

“Then why are you _talking about it_ ,” Arya said and bucked her hips up pointedly, feeling him press her back down with the arm he’d laid across her hips before she could go more than half an inch off the ground. 

He wasn’t laughing now. He dropped his head and kissed her mound. And then he was ducking back down to put his mouth back on her, and she stopped thinking. She stopped breathing. Her mouth was open and no air was coming in, and he licked across her again once, twice, and buried his face in her. 

She cried out and shoved herself down against his face. His arm across her was like an iron bar; she couldn’t go far but she couldn’t stop her hips from moving either. He licked _into_ her, into her opening, a slick shameless press into her body, and he bumped his nose against her clit, and she shuddered all over.

She could hear herself moaning higher and higher, sounds she’d never been able to get out of herself, and she could hear the sound of him eating her out, wet and sloppy, and she was getting closer to coming, and he stopped what he was doing to lick up the length of her again.

“No,” she said, gasping in air, and pulled his hair, trying to put his mouth back. He growled, and she could feel the sound against her. It felt strange; she couldn’t decide if it was good or not; he put his mouth back on her where she wanted it.

She was close. She dropped her head back, panting, grinding down against him. The moonlight fell across her face, harsh even with her eyes closed. Arya groaned in her throat when he moved his arm, but he was only hitching her tighter against him.

It felt so good to move against him. Her hips kept rocking, and she stopped trying to keep them still. Her orgasm was building, tense heat in her spine, her thighs. He took her clit between his lips, so swollen that just the wet heat of his mouth on her made her kicked out, and sucked.

“Don’t stop,” she said, high and too loud. She rubbed down against him, clawed at his shoulders, and she almost—

She wailed, “Don’t stop, _no don’t_ ,” and she growled, furious when he pulled away. But he only kissed her mound over her panties and straightened up.

She was so close. She was _so_ close, and he was thumbing her panties back into place, smoothing them against her tenderly. And that felt good, a cool gentle touch over her swollen clit, but it wasn’t enough. She threw an arm across her face and bit the inside of her forearm.

“You’re dripping for me,” Jon said, low and awed. “But don’t come yet,” and he stroked over her again, maddeningly. “Not yet, okay?”

He wanted to give her what he wanted, or he wanted to kill her. “I hate you,” Arya gasped out.

He softly, intimately. “I want to drive you wild. I just want to get you wild for it. They tried so hard to make us into something we aren’t, and I want you to let it go for me.” He kissed her belly, kissed the swell of her right breast, an open-mouthed kiss hot and damply chafing through her shirt and her bra.

She’d waited years. She’d waited three months, being shifted off his lap every time she ground down against him, being kissed until she was crazy with it then having her hand grabbed away when she tried to touch herself. She’d waited through two months of radio silence, and if she waited any longer, she was going to explode.

She didn’t want to wait any longer. She didn’t want to play his game. But she didn’t—

Arya was never not thinking about it. She was never not inside her head, watching the world through the glass and trying to keep from throwing herself against it just to get out, a tiger going insane inside a zoo.

The moonlight was bright enough to hurt her eyes. She shifted her leg, carefully refolding it the way Jon had placed it before. She made her body relax into the ground.

Jon put his hand on her side and palmed the low end of her ribcage. “Your costume’s pretty,” he said tenderly. “Do you like it? I like how it looks on you. You look so hot in it.”

Arya felt herself flush. It had been a stupid idea picking a package out of the bright plastic-bagged spread Sansa had offered her. She didn’t care what Jon thought of it; she stretched out and looked up at him, chewing her lip.

“I’m trying really hard not to tear it,” Jon said, and he wormed his fingers under the blouse. She wanted him so much, and his hand was trembling on her, and it didn’t matter how much he wanted her in that moment, he was still going to go slow. He was still going to make her insane. Arya had spent up all of her self-control and Jon had saved all of his for her. “Want a picture of you in it, before I go,” Jon murmured. He fingered the hem of her blouse. “Can I take this off, baby?”

They weren’t supposed to be in pictures. Arya thought about stretching out on his bed with her eyes down, hearing the click of the camera on his phone. She thought about looking at the camera instead, the way she’d spent her whole life avoiding. It wasn’t like he could show anyone anyway.

He kissed her, wet and messy, then pulled away when she tried to kiss back. “Let me take it off,” Jon breathed against her mouth. Arya put her arms around his neck, and let him lift her onto his lap, straddling his leg. She rocked down against him, against the hard muscle of him. She was leaving wet marks on his jeans, and it was agony to force herself to stop.

“Don’t,” he said, his hand grabbed at her hip. And she thought he was telling her to stop; she rose up on her knees a little further. But Jon forced her back down, rocked her down until she was hissing, her eyes screwed shut. 

“You can feel good,” Jon said in her ear. He took her earlobe between her teeth and it felt good, the faintest possible bite. “You can do things that make you feel good,” and Arya knew he was talking about every curbed instinct, every aborted motion, every thought she’d ever made die in her head.

It was too rough rubbing on him like this, just the wrong side of friction. Arya was too swollen for it to really feel good. She pulled away again.

“There’s hooks in the back,” she mumbled, scraping her hands through his hair, again and again, just to feel the texture of it. Just because it made her hot, the shameless the way he arched into it.

He reached around her and got the blouse off of her. And then he was grinning, pressing his mouth to her bare shoulder, nuzzling at her. She’d never been so sensitive there before. Everywhere Jon touched, it felt like she grew a few hundred extra nerve endings. “I know you have better bras than this,” he said, and she stilled her hands. “You kept trying to show them to me.”

The bra she was wearing was plain grey cotton. “You weren’t home,” Arya said, outraged. “You weren’t coming home! I didn’t go there to find someone, some stranger, and just let them—”

“I know,” Jon soothed her. His hand on her bare back burned. He traced down her spine, her ribs, and she pressed back into the touch. “I like it,” he said, and his smile was sweeter. “That’s all. I like that nobody knows but me what you’ve got under your clothes.”

There was never going to be anyone but Jon. She pressed her mouth to his, and kissed him and kissed him. She didn’t look at anyone else and see a man; she looked at them and saw walking piles of bone and meat and blood. Arya looked at a man and thought things she shouldn’t have.

The rough denim of his jeans scraped rug-burn onto the inside of her thighs. The air was cool, she knew it was, but she felt so hot, fevered. She squeezed her legs closed tighter, shifting, then rolled off him before he could stop her. Jon tensed, and Arya knew he wanted to chase her, but he made himself still. He’d saved up all his self-control for her and it made her eyes wet, glossy.

Arya didn’t go far. She unsnapped her bra, and cast it aside. He was watching, and that made her flush all down her belly. Her nipples were tight in the cool air. She touched the button on her skirt.

He’d seen her body before. He’d gotten his mouth wet with her. Jon wanted her wild; she didn’t have to pretend not to be eager, not to be nervous. 

In the moonlight, she had an animal’s body, an animal’s want. She was so swollen between her legs that it hurt in deep aching pulses. She could feel her heartbeat there and she kept looking at Jon, at his mouth and his hands and the line of his cock in his jeans, and every time she did, she clenched down on nothing.

He hadn’t wanted to damage her costume. Arya was losing control; her hands trembled faintly as she peeled off her skirt and underwear. It took a monstrous amount of force to tear through denim if there wasn’t a cut in it already. You couldn’t bite through it with a human jaw. She would shred his jeans right off his body. “Will you please take your fucking clothes off,” she said restlessly when all he did was stare. 

He peeled off his jacket, watching her. He spread it out on the ground carefully, and she was so fucked up for him. Arya would have fucked him in the dirt; she would take anything she could get. She was so out of her mind with arousal that it seemed impossible to care about things like _comfort_ or _consequences_. And Jon put his jacket out like a blanket on the ground and tore his shirt up off his head.

Bruises were kisses for them, scrapes same as a caress. What was the line between touch and blow? Jon had a dark spot from her foot blooming on his hip, and a red spot bruising up on his neck from her mouth. She liked it too much. It made her chest hot with pride. Arya liked seeing her mark on him—she wanted to suck bruises into his body until nobody could deny that he was hers.

He took off his jeans, and his cock sprang up, dark and hard. She wasn’t so far gone that the injustice of it passed her over. “Do you _ever_ wear underwear?” she demanded. “Or do you just like making fun of other people’s,” and she flung her bra at his face.

“I like your underwear,” Jon said, wounded. “I wouldn’t make fun of it, baby.” And then shameless with it, it made her so hot how shameless he was to want her, “I’m taking your panties with me when I go back.”

She choked, trying not to laugh. Who even said things like that? His teeth looked so sharp when he smiled. “You’re disgusting,” she said. “I hate you.”

He said back, settling down on his jacket, “Come here and kiss me.”

She crawled. It was an animal body, an animal want, and it was good that he wanted her wild with it, because Arya didn’t think she could be any other way with how worked-up she was in that moment. Jon seeing her in the stupid costume made her hot; Jon watching her crawl, reaching out and cupping her breast as she slid into his lap, made her moan.

He thumbed her nipple, then bent his head and kissed it. Arya dug her fingers into the muscles of his upper arm and put her other hand to his neck.

Just below it, not grabbing it but resting there. It was a threat, it was a promise. He wanted her wild. She said, “I’m done waiting. I don’t care if you’re good to me. I just want you to fuck me, Jon, _please_.”

His eyes were liquid, brilliant. Arya knew her eyes were the same. She bit him, his jaw and his chin.she left pressure-white imprints of her teeth there, and scraped her mouth down his neck and chased her path back up with her tongue. His cock was hard against his stomach, and she touched it carefully, wrapping her fingers around it. Hot, hotter than her hand, and she mouthed at his shoulder and his neck, touching him and loving it too much to stop.

“Arya,” Jon said, wounded with it, and cupped the split of her. He rubbed her wetness back into her skin, into her thighs, in strokes that worked her up until she wanted to cry. 

She took her hand away, her stomach clenching to hear him groan, and put her hand between her legs. She was dripping; she hated him being right about it. Jon was good at everything, good at everything that mattered. He touched her and she moaned; he touched her and she ached for him. She wet her hand with her own slick and wrapped it back around his cock.

His skin was soft; he was hard under that. There were muscles there, she thought, veins and ropes of tissue, but she didn’t care about it. She couldn’t remember what they were, not a single Latin name. She jerked him and Jon grabbed her hip so hard that it hurt.

He palmed the bone and said, “You’re so good to me. My baby’s so fucking good to me. Let me just, let me—”

He touched her, thumbed her clit, and took his hand away before she could rock into it. And then he slid his fingers inside. Two, and she gasped and felt her hand tremble on him. His fingers were thicker than her own. That’s all that had been up there, her own fingers, and it hadn’t even been that good. She’d left off to rub her clit instead every time she tried. But it was good now, thick inside her, a firm touch where she shivered with delicateness.

She felt wild with it. He fingered her, rocking his wrist, and she couldn’t stop clenching down against it. This was nothing like anything, this was like running screaming through the trees in the middle of the night just because she could, just because no one could stop her. “Please,” Arya said wetly and turned to press her cheek to his neck. 

She was kneeling in his lap; he put his other hand to her hip and rubbed all up her side and across her ribs. “In a second,” he said, hoarse. “Let me, huh? Let me be good to you like this,” and he moved his hand until she was whining with it.

Arya was a virgin, but she wasn’t stupid. “I’ve watched porn,” she said and rubbed the head of his cock until he grunted. Velvet soft skin. She wanted to get her mouth on it, but if he stopped touching her, she’d died. She said, “I know it’s going to fit no matter what.”

He laughed at her. She growled at him in her throat, let go of his cock, and tried to retreat. And then he was grabbing her, too hard to fight against, her hipbone fitting so well against his palm, his fingers digging into her skin and sure to bruise. “It’s not like porn,” he said.

“ _You_ like it like porn,” she said. There was never going to be anyone but Jon. It wasn’t like she’d learned to jack him off him any other way.

“I’d probably like it even if you bit me there,” Jon told her. “I’d howl, but I’d like it. Girls are different.”

She tried to roll her eyes, and he did something inside her with his hand. She shuddered instead. “Do you like that?” he asked, low and pleasant. “Tell me you like that.”

Her body kept wanting to stop breathing. Taking in air was a distraction; it felt like she couldn’t do anything but feel whatever he was doing between her legs. She gasped out air and grabbed desperately his arm. “Uh-huh,” she managed when he tried to stop.

He made a noise deep in his chest. And then he touched something inside her that made her want to curl up in a ball. All of her shook—it was impossible to feel that good without dying, without bursting out of her skin. She made a shocked, raw noise as he stroked her there again. “Just like that,” he murmured to himself. And then, pride warring with tenderness, “You liked _that_. I felt how much you liked that.”

“Do it again,” Arya begged like he'd torn it out of her, and he gave her pressure there until she cried out. It hurt this time when he stopped; it was a pain deep inside her. He kept his fingers tucked just in the mouth of her cunt, and she felt so empty and open, just barely split on his touch. She could feel the wetness drooling out of her and down his fingers and his wrist. 

“It’s different from porn,” Jon said, breathing harder. She wasn’t touching his cock anymore; he wanted it because she wanted it; she wanted him inside her again. She tried to rock down, mindless. He said, trying to talk them both away from the edge, “Girls need more—”

She didn’t like it enough to lie there and listen to him talk about other girls he’d fucked. “I don’t need the greatest hits,” Arya burst out, embarrassing herself with how upset she sounded.

He paused, looked up at her. His eyes were like hers; they held the moonlight. Arya knew she was flushing, even as she braced her hands on his chest. Jon said slowly, “Would it help—”

“—No, it wouldn’t—” she bit out, cringing.

“—if I said I thought about you?”

 _She_ thought about him when she touched herself, but that was different from fucking another living breathing human being. “I’m going to let you fuck me,” she told him. “Your hand is _inside me_. You don’t have to convince me, and you don’t have to lie—”

“I’m not lying,” and he was serious, his eyebrows furrowed. “Didn’t I tell you? Gods, you never listen to me.” He arched his neck up, kissed _her_ neck just under her jaw, and scraped his teeth against that spot that made her squeak. “I’m fucked up over you, baby,” he said, hot and humid on her skin, “in the worst possible way.”

Jon’s girlfriends had all been so different from each other. The only thing they shared was making Arya eat herself alive with jealousy. “Even with—” she gasped out, and tried to remember the name of even a single one of them.

“With them all,” Jon said. 

He slid his fingers all the way out of her. She felt different without them. It wasn’t bad, it didn’t _hurt_ , but she wanted it back. She wanted something there inside her again.

He didn’t care that his hand was wet. He touched her with it anyway, dragging her closer, until she was kneeling above his cock. “Like this?” she asked, feeling a little surprised. She’d always thought, him above her. She wanted him above her a little. She wanted him to block out the sky; she wanted his eyes on her brighter than the moonlight.

But she was already reaching between them, wrapping her hand around him. “I want to see your face,” Jon said, and grabbed at her ass. He wasn’t even pretending to help, just groping her and keeping his eyes on her as she put him where she wanted him.

She was so wet that it was almost embarrassing. It took two tries to get him in; his cock slipped against her the first time. “Shut up,” Arya warned when Jon huffed out a laugh. If he laughed, she’d laugh too, collapsed against him and more tense, more relaxed than she’d ever been in her life.

She wanted him _in_ her. “Don’t you dare—” she warned him, trying again, notching the head of his cock where she still felt open, where she was dripping for him.

She lost the rest of it to a gasp. He was thicker than his fingers and different inside her. Softer, different. A cock was skin and cartilage and blood. His knuckles had been a force when he’d crooked his fingers; this was a single smooth glide into her.

She liked this better. He didn’t make a single sound, silent as she took him inside all the way. Arya’s thighs trembled, her fingernails dug into his shoulders. He was rubbing against her in the best possible way and she opened her mouth and whined.

She didn’t know how to move. “What,” she demanded, breathless. “What—”

His hands on her ass guided her now. Jon was breathing hard, almost panting. His whole body trembled, prey-fine, and it was driving her crazy. When he touched her lower back she arched into him, she rubbed her clit against him, and _there_.

That was what she wanted. She chased it, bent her head, bit at his mouth until he groaned, and dragged her down against him. And then he gave up, gave in. He rocked up into her, a hard snap of his hips that made her cry out.

“I’m so fucked up for you,” Jon said into her mouth. He dragged her down flush to him and rocked into her until she had to shut her eyes. Seeing things was too much. The world shouldn’t exist except for his body under hers, the place he filled inside her.

“Baby,” Jon panted out, and nothing else. It wasn’t even a word in his mouth, just a sound, a raw hoarse sound. She’d made him sound like that. She’d knocked the words right out of his mouth.

“Uh-huh,” Arya gasped, chasing it, shivering at the wet slap of their skin every time he bounced her. She squirmed closer and rubbed her clit frantically against the ridges of his belly, twisting her hands in his hair. He felt so good inside her. Her calves ached. Her breasts moved with the force of him every time he fucked into her and that felt good too.

His hands were on her sides, her back. Arya opened her eyes and looked down at Jon, at his red mouth. He would put that mouth back between her legs and lick himself off her skin if she wanted him to. She could want it. She could have it, just for asking, a hand on him, a look. And he was fucking up into her, brutal, wild, and her skin on his skin felt so good. She was made of nerve endings. She rubbed against him, felt the air touch her, wet over her thighs, wet where she was spread wide on his lap, and she came.

He kept fucking her, and she worked down against him, clawing his shoulders, his back. She was moaning, high and sharp, and the moonlight electrified her. She bent her head and sank down onto him, all her weight on his lap, all of his cock inside her, and she sank her teeth into the soft skin that joined his shoulder and his neck.

Arya heard Jon say, “Fuck!” from far away.

Either she came twice, or she came long. She felt him tense under her, and the rhythm of his thrusts stuttered. He slammed into her twice, trembling and forceful. She felt him pulse inside of her. She clenched around him and relaxed and clenched again, unconscious of anything but the feeling. When she was finally rubber-legged and quiet and sucking in air, slick all over with sweat, she fell against him.

Her mouth felt wet. Her jaw ached faintly. Jon put his hands across the small of her back and toppled them to the side. She felt him slip out of her, and she squeezed her thighs together tightly, shivering.

He kissed her mouth and nuzzled his face against her. She felt loose all over, an unwound spring. Gods but her jaw hurt. “Are you bleeding?” she rasped out when they stopped kissing and came up for air.

Jon’s eyes were blank. He tilted his head to the side, and let her see. She’d left tooth marks in him. She’d savaged him. Arya leaned down and licked at it, hot pressure to soothe the ache. He was petting her hair. Arya put an arm around his shoulders, threw a leg over his side, let him touch her however he wanted.

He let her mouth the mark and clean it with her tongue, a press of the tip into each blood divot. An animal want; she could almost sleep like this with her mouth against him, tasting the gore. When he shifted and slid the hand on her back down between her legs, she hissed and made an involuntary little motion away.

He chased her, pressed his fingers inside her, and she tightened around them. His mouth was red, red, red when he pressed it to hers, and her mouth was bloody and he licked the taste of pennies off her gums. He’d need concealer. He’d need a high-necked shirt. He’d have to hide it until it healed, and the thought made her so furious.

She was so loose, all of her muscles melted out and uneven. There was no way to press the rage down. Normal people didn’t bite other people, and all she wanted to do was sink her teeth into Jon again. She wanted to taste the meat of his chest, his arm. 

She wanted him to bite her back, twice as hard.

He slid his fingers out of her and ran them between her ass cheeks and into her again. No one had ever touched her there but him. It made her jolt against him, made her moan as he mumbled, “You’re so open,” like he was thinking about it again. Like he might roll her over and fuck back into her.

Arya was so fucked up for him, so stupid for him. Spit and blood were sticky down her chin and there was a mess between her legs. She rolled onto her back and dragged him over her.

Jon braced an arm beside her head and rocked against her, half-hard already. Night birds were singing; there was cricketsong somewhere close. She’d never left the woods, not really. She wanted someone to see the bite on his neck, the wound of it, without them cringing back in disgust. She wanted everyone to see her mark on him.

“I want it,” Arya mumbled, and he grunted and rocked against her again. 

It was enough to say it. It was enough to taste it in her mouth, hot and bitter. He didn’t need to understand yet; she wasn’t brave enough to say it again; she didn’t even know if she meant it. 

Jon put his mouth to her ear and rasped, “You will. You’ll want it. You’ll mean it. But I can wait until then.”

He was getting hard against her. She felt so swollen between her legs, still aching. If he asked her again, she’d say something she regretted. If he fucked her again, he’d bite her. She’d make him bite her.

Hands on his chest, she shoved him off of her. Jon was pounds of muscle and sinew packed over bone, and he should have been harder to move, but he rolled away at the softest touch and put his hands on her wrists. He drew her up to sit and face him.

Everything they did was dangerous, but this was the worst. She was so fucked up and crazy for him. “We should go home,” Arya said. His eyes were brilliant; his mouth was wet with her kiss, his blood. Jon had never left the woods either.

“Kiss me first,” she demanded. “Kiss me. Just kiss me.”

He pressed their mouths together, open and sweet. Arya rubbed her tongue against his, licked the sharp edges of his teeth, and felt heat wash over her. 

When they stood up, Jon bent down to gather up his jacket. He could have her panties, but Arya was keeping this. They’d left an unholy wet spot on it; it reeked of them. He threw it around her shoulders and kissed her again. 

She was so fucked up for him. He moved at her touch; he stayed where she put him. He mouthed the place mirrored on her body the way she wanted him to, without her even having to ask. The skin was still smooth and white on her. Her breath hitched. He could. He should. The torn skin would scab, or it would if she could keep him from licking the scabs off. If she could keep his mouth off of her.

It was getting colder. Arya lived in layers, a better barrier between the world and her. She hated hiding it; no one would have to know.

Jon was all of her worst decisions. She put her hand on his neck, a warning, and stepped away. She felt the moment all his limbs flexed, a lunge for her that he curbed. He let her move away another stumbling step. 

“Let me get your clothes,” Jon rasped, holding onto her elbow. There were smears of blood all across his neck and chest. “Just stay here for a second, baby,” he crooned. “Just rest.”

It wasn’t like fucking him had exhausted her, and he was the one bleeding. But Arya’s step away from him had wobbled. Her teeth felt strange in her mouth. All of her felt irreversibly altered. She was so fucked-stupid and dizzy that at first, she thought the snap of the twig under pressure was something she’d done.

But something was breathing that wasn’t them. Jon put a hand on her waist and turned his head in the smallest of fractions. The air smelled like tree rot, and sweat, and the harshness of his blood. Like sex, a cloud of it between them, clinging to their skin. 

And like an animal, the soft musk of the deer standing only a few feet away. A doe with damp black eyes, legs hidden in the grass, and lean body dappled with streaks and dabs of moonlight.

Arya didn’t have it, and Jon didn’t either. They’d never had what Robb and Sansa had, whatever it was that drew prey to them like moths to a full moon’s light, like skittering insects to a campfire. Mesmerized, and moony, unconcerned.

They didn’t have it, except for when they _did_. 

The deer stepped closer, snorting at them curiously. One thin delicate ear flicked.

A deer had twenty common cuts of meat a hunter could harvest, vital organs and all of them edible, twenty-eight feet of intestine. They’d learned to hunt where rifles and bows were illegal. They’d learned to hunt in these woods and Arya had never really left them.

Impulse gripped her. Instinct gripped her. Arya shouldn’t. She knew she shouldn’t. They were older now; all of them knew better, even Rickon. There was a line between what they were, and what they should be, and they weren’t supposed to cross it.

Arya burned up all her self-control trying not to cross it.

The moonlight poured down around them. Jon put his hand on her bare stomach, a hot hard touch, and said in her ear, “You don’t ever have to pretend with me. And if you come with me, if you _mean it_ , we’d never have to pretend again.”

The deer blinked long dark lashes at them, unconcerned. It bent that slender neck to mouth at the dry grass. Dad always said it was the wolf’s blood making her so wild. Keeping her under the trees. How could you grow out of your own blood? Arya wouldn’t, ever. She wanted this too much for that. 

His jacket slipped off her shoulders. She was so excited. She was so afraid.

The moonlight poured down on her, fat and full. She moved.

### 

> Inside,  
>  as always,  
>  it was hard to tell  
>  fear from excitement:  
>  how sensual  
>  the lightning’s  
>  poured stroke! and still,  
>  what a fire and a risk!  
>  As always the body  
>  wants to hide,  
>  wants to flow toward it - strives  
>  to balance while  
>  fear shouts,  
>  excitement shouts, back  
>  and forth - each  
>  bolt a burning river  
>  tearing like escape through the dark  
>  field of the other.  
>  —Mary Oliver, _Lightning_

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Halloween! I hope you're staying safe out there! Here's a treat (and a little trick, because I couldn't resist), and I sincerely hope you enjoyed it. If you have questions/comments/etc about the Starks in this fic, or about the ending, please let me know. I tried my hand at mild ambiguity here and would love to see if it worked.
> 
> And, as it turns out, you _don't_ get less embarrassed when posting smut?? I think it actually got worse. Maybe I haven't reached critical mass in terms of exposure, but fingers crossed my rampant embarrassment stayed out of the text.
> 
> Consider letting me know what you thought here, at my email ao3throwaway27@gmail.com, or by dropping me a line on my [tumblr](https://mysticalmuddle.tumblr.com/). It really does help to know I'm not the only person out here sinning over this ship.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who reads/kudos'es/comments/bookmarks! Thank you to everyone who got excited for this fic! And thank you to the gal who held my hand through it basically the entire time! It takes a village, and I love each and every one of you! <333


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